Bouncing Sayings And Quotes

His hands skim my bare arms. “Just bounce a little when you walk,” he says, kissing my forehead, “and pretend you’re afraid of their guns” —another kiss between my eyebrows— “and act like the shrinking violet you could never be ”—a kiss on my cheek— “and you’ll be fine.

Beetee is still messing round the tree, doing I don't know what. At one point he snaps off a sliver of bark, joins us, and throws it against the force field. It bounces back and lands on the ground, glowing. In a few moments it returns to its original color. "Well, that explains a lot," says Beetee. I look at Peeta and can't help biting my lip to keep from laughing since it explains absolutely nothing to anyone but Beetee.

What was that?" Belgarath asked, coming back around the corner. "Brill," Silk replied blandly, pulling his Murgo robe back on. "Again?" Belgarath demanded with exasperation. "What was he doing this time?" "Trying to fly, last time I saw him." Silk smirked. The old man looked puzzled. "He wasn't doing it very well," Silk added. Belgarath shrugged. "Maybe it'll come to him in time." "He doesn't really have all that much time." Silk glanced out over the edge. "From far below - terribly far below - there came a faint, muffled crash; then, after several seconds, another. "Does bouncing count?" Silk asked. Belgarath made a wry face. "Not really." "Then I'd say he didn't learn in time." Silk said blithely.

Because I wanted you." He turned from the window to face me. "More than I ever wanted anything in my life," he added softly. I continued staring at him, dumbstruck. Whatever I had been expecting, it wasn't this. Seeing my openmouthed expression, he continued lightly. "When I asked my da how ye knew which was the right woman, he told me when the time came, I'd have no doubt. And I didn't. When I woke in the dark under that tree on the road to Leoch, with you sitting on my chest, cursing me for bleeding to death, I said to myself, 'Jamie Fraser, for all ye canna see what she looks like, and for all she weighs as much as a good draft horse, this is the woman'" I started toward him, and he backed away, talking rapidly. "I said to myself, 'She's mended ye twice in as many hours, me lad; life amongst the MacKenzies being what it is, it might be as well to wed a woman as can stanch a wound and set broken bones.' And I said to myself, 'Jamie, lad, if her touch feels so bonny on your collarbone, imagine what it might feel like lower down...'" He dodged around a chair. "Of course, I thought it might ha' just been the effects of spending four months in a monastery, without benefit of female companionship, but then that ride through the dark together"--he paused to sigh theatrically, neatly evading my grab at his sleeve--"with that lovely broad arse wedged between my thighs"--he ducked a blow aimed at his left ear and sidestepped, getting a low table between us--"and that rock-solid head thumping me in the chest"--a small metal ornament bounced off his own head and went clanging to the floor--"I said to myself..." He was laughing so hard at this point that he had to gasp for breath between phrases. "Jamie...I said...for all she's a Sassenach bitch...with a tongue like an adder's ...with a bum like that...what does it matter if she's a f-face like a sh-sh-eep?" I tripped him neatly and landed on his stomach with both knees as he hit the floor with a crash that shook the house. "You mean to tell me that you married me out of love?" I demanded. He raised his eyebrows, struggling to draw in breath. "Have I not...just been...saying so?

Being in love is a very strange thing. Your thoughts constantly drift towards this other person, no matter what you’re doing. You could be reaching for a glass in the cupboard or brushing your teeth or listening to someone tell a story, and your mind will just start drifting towards their face, their hair, the way they smell, wondering what they’ll wear, and what they’ll say the next time they see you. And on top of the constant dream state you’re in, your stomach feels like it’s connected to a bungee cord, and it bounces and bounces around for hours until it finally lodges itself next to your heart.

If I was gay, I wouldn't need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a coming-out party without people thinking I just want attention. I wouldn't have to explain that I fall in love with minds, not genders or body parts. People wouldn't say I'm 'just a slut' or 'faking it' or 'undecided' or 'confused.' I'm not confused. I don't categorize people by who I'm allowed to like and who I'm allowed to love. Love doesn't fit into boxes like that. It's blurry, slippery, quantum. It's only limited by our perceptions and before we slap a label on it and cram it into some category, everything is possible.

Getting up means leaving,” I say. “Yeah,” Rufus says. “Leaving means dying,” I say. “Nah. Leaving means living before you die. Let’s bounce.

I'm rubber, you're glue, whatever you say bounce off me and sticks to you.

Puddleglum,' they've said, 'You're altogether too full of bobance and bounce and high spirits. You've got to learn that life isn't all fricasseed frogs and ell pie. You want something to sober you down a bit. We're only saying it for your own good, Puddleglum.' That's what they say. Now a job like this --a journey up north just as winter's beginning looking for a prince that probably isn't there, by way of ruined city nobody's ever seen-- will be just the thing. If that doesn't steady a chap, I don't know what will.

Tessa exploded "I am not asking you to maul me in the Whispering Gallery! By the Angel, Will, would you stop being so polite?!" He looked at her in amazement. "But wouldn't you rather-" "I would not rather. I don't want you to be polite! I want you to be Will! I don't want you to indicate points of architectural interest to me as if you were a Baedecker guide! I want you to say dreadfully mad, funny things, and make up songs and be-" The Will I fell in love with, she almost said. "And be Will," she finished instead. "Or I shall strike you with my umbrella." "I am trying to court you," Will said in exasperation. "Court you properly. That's what all this has been about. You know that, don't you?" "Mr. Rochester never courted Jane Eyre," Tessa pointed out. "No, he dressed up as a woman and terrified the poor girl out of her wits. Is that what you want?" "You would make a very ugly woman." "I would not. I would be stunning." Tessa laughed. "There," she said. "There is Will. Isn't that better? Don't you think so?" "I don't know," Will said, eyeing her. I'm afraid to answer that. I've heard that when I speak, it makes American women wish to strike me with umbrellas." Tessa laughed again, and then they were both laughing, their smothered giggles bouncing off the walls of the Whispering Gallery. After that, things were decidedly easier between them, and Will's smile when he helped her down from the carriage on their return home, was bright and real.

Pervy and redundant, don't you think?" I asked the big gay cop, who wouldn't know a va-jay-jay if it bounced up to him and sang the "Star-Spangled Banner." (You ever notice that hardly anything besides the "Star-Spangled Banner" is spangled? There's no, like, the Raisin-Spangled Scone, or the Flea-Spangled Beagle. I'm just saying.) --Being the Journal of Abby Normal

Remus, I could kiss you right now," Sirius corrects, still looking like he's about to start bouncing. "Do it," Remus says. Sirius laughs, then chokes and nearly breaks his neck looking over at him, eyes wide. "What?" Remus rolls his eyes. "A joke, Padfoot.

Persevere like a seed; even when people try to bury you, flourish.

There's always more than one interpretation," Orion said from the doorway. Everyone turned to look at him as he came back into the library. "Face it. The Fates speak in riddles because they don't know what the hell they're talking about. If they did, they'd say something straightforward like, 'Orion is the Tyrant and he wants to eat your brains for breakfast' or whatever." Hector's shoulders started bouncing up and down with silent laughter. Lucas turned his head away and tried to stuff down a laugh of his own, but he made the mistake of catching Jason's eye. "Zombie Tyrant," Jason whispered to Lucas, his face turning red with a repressed laugh. "Huzzah death," Lucas whispered back, cracking up. Apparently, that was some kind of inside joke between the Delos boys because all three of them busted out laughing.

Everything you do, everything you sense and say is experiment. No deduction final. Nothing stops until dead and perhaps not even then, because each life creates endless ripples. Induction bounces within and you sensitize yourself to it. Deduction conveys illusions of absolutes. Kick the truth and shatter it!

When I shoot, the ball bounces hard against the backboard, and flies wildly through the air, knocking the coach in the head. I slap a hand over my mouth. The coach barely catches herself from falling. Several students laugh. She glares at me and readjusts her cap. With a small wave of apology, I head back to the end of the line. Will's there fighting laughter. "Nice," he says. "Glad I'm downcourt of you." I cross my arms and resist smiling, resist letting myself feel good around him. But he makes it hard. I want to smile. I want to like him, to be around him, to know him. "Happy to amuse you.

I do not think I exaggerate when I say that some of us put our offering in the plate with a kind of triumphant bounce as much as to say: "There - now God will feel better!" I am obliged to tell you that God does not need anything you have. He does not need a dime of your money. It is your own spiritual welfare at stake in such matters as these. You have the right to keep what you have all to yourself - but it will rust and decay, and ultimately ruin you.

Oh, it’s our pleasure,” Maryse told her son. She advanced on Alec, her hands out. She reminded Magnus of a bird of prey, talons outstretched, overcome by hunger. “What do you say,” she said in an alarmingly sweet voice, “you let me hold the baby? I’m the one in the room with the most experience with babies, after all.” “That’s not true, Alec,” said Robert. “That is not true! I was very involved with all of you when you were young. I’m excellent with babies.” Alec blinked at his father, who had appeared by Alec’s side with Shadowhunter speed. “As I recall,” Maryse said, “you bounce them.” “Babies love that,” Robert claimed. “Babies love bouncing.

Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business centre hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gently - not fall, not jump - but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially if giving on the roof of an old tenacious normal house far below where a cat may be trusted to flash out of the way. Another popular take-off is a mountaintop with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised how easy it is to miscalculate your deflection offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive. The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off - farewell, shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord.

Whatever anyone does,/ anyone says, in the/ past, now, everything, let/ it bounce off the rock/ of yr gladness (yr mirror)

Thank God no one was bouncing.' 'You can say that again, Ass Whisperer.' 'Thank God no one was bouncing,' Cam said, and she started to drift off to sleep.

Hey Wanda! Hey Ian!" Jamie was all grins, his messy hair bouncing as he moved..."Guess what? Jared was saying at lunch that he didn't think it was fair for you to have to move out of the room you were used to. He said we weren't being good hosts. He said you should move back in with me! Isn't that great? I asked him if I could tell you right away, and he said that was a good idea. He said you would be in here." "I'll bet he did," Ian murmured. "So, what do you think, Wanda? We get to be roomies again!" "But Jamie, where will Jared stay?" "Wait - let me guess," Ian interrupted. "I bet he said the room was big enough for three. Am I right?" "Yeah. How did you know?" "Lucky guess" ... "Will you come back?" Jamie begged against my shoulder..."If that's what you want, Jamie. Okay." "Woo hoo!" Jamie crowed in my ear. "Cool! I'm gonna go tell Jared! I'll get you some food, too, okay?...You want something, Ian?" "Sure, kid. I want you to tell Jared he's shameless.

The guys in the saloons shoving free ones across the bar and saying happy new year and many more of them kid you been a good customer have one on the house happy new year and the hell with the prohibitionists some day the bastards are going to give us trouble. The girls from the hash houses and the girls from the hotels and the guys swarming out of dirty little apartment bedrooms and music and dancing and smoke and somebody with the ukulele and have another and the feeling of being lonesome that everybody has inside him and people bouncing against you and off you and have another one and a girl passing out at the bar and a fight and happy new year.

Encounters between people, it often seems to me, are like trains passing at breakneck speed in the night. We cast fleeting looks at the passengers sitting behind dull glass in dim light, who disappear from our field of vision almost before we perceive them. Was it really a man and a woman who flashed past like phantoms, who came out of nothing into the empty dark, without meaning or purpose? Did they know each other? Did they talk? Laugh? Cry? People will say: That's how it is when strangers pass one another in rain and wind and there might be something in the comparison. But we sit opposite people for longer, we eat and work together, lie next to each other, live under the same roof. Where is the haste? Yet everything that gives the illusion of permanence, familiarity, and intimate knowledge: isn't it a deception invented to reassure, with which we try to conceal and ward off the flickering, disturbing haste because it could be impossible to live with all the time. Isn't every exchange of looks between people like the ghostly brief meeting of eyes between travellers passing one another, intoxicated by the inhuman speed and the shock of air pressure that makes everything shudder and clatter? Don't our looks bounce off others, as in the hasty encounter of the night, and leave us with nothing but conjectures, slivers of thoughts and imagined qualities? Isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?

He told her: he fell from the sky and lived. She took a deep breath and believed him, because of her father's faith in the myriad and contradictory possibilities of life, and because, too, of what the mountain had taught her. "Okay," she said, exhaling. "I'll buy it. Just don't tell my mother, all right?" The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of days back, that as part of their natural processes of combustion, the stars in the skies crushed carbon into diamonds. The idea of the stars raining diamonds into the void: that sounded like a miracle, too. If that could happen, so could this. Babies fell out of zillionth-floor windows and bounced. There was a scene about that in François Truffaut's movie L'Argent du Poche...She focused her thoughts. "Sometimes," she decided to say, "wonderful things happen to me, too.

When Christian pushes into the brick wall of the building catty-corner to the rear of BB&B—first left on the Dark Zone side—and disappears, I melt down in a fit of the giggles. I toss a rock at the spot where he vanished. It bounces off the brick and clatters to the cobblestone. I'm feeling twenty shades of Harry Potter's train station, especially when he pokes his head out of the wall and says impatiently, "Come on, lass. This is hardly my favorite place to be.

And one cried wee, wee, wee, all the way—" Jessica breaking down in a giggle as he reaches for the spot along her sweatered flank he knows she can't bear to be tickled in. She hunches, squirming, out of the way as he rolls past, bouncing off the back of the sofa but making a nice recovery, and by now she's ticklish all over, he can grab an ankle, elbow— But a rocket has suddenly struck. A terrific blast quite close beyond the village: the entire fabric of the air, the time, is changed—the casement window blown inward, rebounding with a wood squeak to slam again as all the house still shudders. Their hearts pound. Eardrums brushed taut by the overpressure ring in pain. The invisible train rushes away close over the rooftop.... They sit still as the painted dogs now, silent, oddly unable to touch. Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says try to tickle me.

Nouwen suggested we all find ourselves bouncing around three very human lies that we believe about our identity: I am what I have, I am what I do, and I am what other people say or think about me.

I say, sah! Sorry to trouble you to get off your big fat bottom and help a poor gel out!" "I would not have helped if you hadn't have needed it. You were doing well on your own until the vermin started trying to use trickery." Dottie bounced on her footpaws, her large ears stand up straight. "I know, sah! The bally old blighters didn't know wot hit 'em!" Lord Brocktree hid a smile.

in his open palm. His eyes never leave mine. “I want you, Arianna Johnson, like no man has ever wanted a woman before. I’m sure of it. I want to give you the life you dreamed of, the one you shared with me. I want to give you a home on the ocean, one that will be ours, where the back deck faces the ocean, so we can sit outside at night while the sun sets, but only so we can watch the way the moon bounces off the water the way you love. I want to come home and cook for you while you sit back and watch our little one in your arms.

Ren exhaled heavily. “God, you’re so annoying.” “So?” Tink hovered in front of the couch, his wings furiously beating the air. “I’m rubber and you’re glue!” Ren turned to face the little guy. “What?” “Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you!” Ren stared at him and then slowly shook his head as he turned back to me. “It’s like living with a two-year-old with the mental capacity of a fifteen-year-old boy.

After a leisurely slide into second, Joe bounced to his feet, looked at Marichal, shrugged, smiled, and spread his arms as if to say, "You throw at me, I'll make you pay.

Read to go?" I remain seated. "Getting up means leaving," I say. "Yeah," Rufus says. "Leaving means dying," I say. "Nah. Leaving means living before you die. Let's bounce.

Read to go?" I remain seated. "Getting up means leaving," I say. "Yeah," Rufus says. "LEaving means ding," I say. "Nah. LEaving means living before you die. Let's bounce.

Sometimes during the night I'd look at my poor sleeping mother cruelly crucified there in the American night because of no-money, no-hope-of-money, no family, no nothing, just myself the stupid son of plans all of them compacted of eventual darkness. God how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life - and to think that negative little paper-shuffling prissies should write condescending obituaries about a man who told the truth, nay who drew breath in pain to tell a tale like that! ... No remedy but in my mind I raise a fist to High Heaven promising that I shall bull whip the first bastard who makes fun of human hopelessness anyway - I know it's ridiculous to pray to my father that hunk of dung in a grave yet I pray to him anyway, what else shall I do? sneer? shuffle paper on a desk and burp rationality? Ah thank God for all the Rationalists the worms and vermin got. Thank God for all the hate mongering political pamphleteers with no left or right to yell about in the Grave of Space. I say that we shall all be reborn with the Only One, and that's what makes me go on, and my mother too. She has her rosary in the bus, don't deny her that, that's her way of stating the fact. If there can't be love among men let there be love at least between men and God. Human courage is an opiate but opiates are human too. If God is an opiate so am I. Thefore eat me. Eat the night, the long desolate American between Sanford and Shlamford and Blamford and Crapford, eat the hematodes that hang parasitically from dreary southern trees, eat the blood in the ground, the dead Indians, the dead pioneers, the dead Fords and Pontiacs, the dead Mississippis, the dead arms of forlorn hopelessness washing underneath - Who are men, that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking 'What is there to laugh about in that?' 'How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?' 'Who makes fun of misery?' There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didn't ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who also didn't ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads - Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness, forever?

As if some little spark in Trixie cognised some little spark in Saroj, and those two bright little sparks leaped in joy and bounced out at each other saying, Hi, here I am! Been missing you all my life. That's the way true friendships begin, those rare friendships as true as gold, that stand the knocks of time.

I liked my house. I liked my stuff. I had to start over once. I don't want to have to do it again. But life says, ‘Tough bounce,' and what are my options? Take it on the chin and keep marching.

But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.

Gotta bounce,” I say, remembering that’s what I heard someone say to someone sometime somewhere, at school or maybe it was on TV, or in a movie, probably not even from this decade, but who cares, all I know is I have to get away before I evaporate or crumple or cry.

Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles of wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there's a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I'll never find them again - never.

It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

I rarely cry in public anymore. I’ve become a person about which people probably say, “She’s really bounced back quite nicely.” I am lying to them. I have not bounced back nicely. I’ve just learned to impersonate the living.

Because I kissed you? Seriously? You only like me because I’m a good kisser? That’s it. We’re not doing this. I’m not letting you risk your life just because you can’t think with your upstairs brain.” “No, you twit.” Ryan laughed. “Because you kissed me that day. I expected the ice queen and got a funny, go-with-the-flow girl that didn’t care what anyone thought about her. A girl willing to stir up gossip just so that I could win a date with someone else. “You didn’t have to help me. In fact, you probably should have been insulted, but you weren’t. You kissed me, you smiled, and then you wished me good luck. No one’s ever surprised me like that. I couldn’t figure out why you did it, and I just had to get to know you after that.” I had no idea that stupid kiss had that kind of effect on him. Charged him up like a battery, sure, but do all that? All this time I really thought it was just the superkissing that kept him coming back. I looked down at my lunch, feeling a little ashamed of my lack of faith in him, but Ryan couldn’t stop there. Oh, no, not Ryan Miller. “After that day, every time I was with you I got brief glimpses of the real Jamie, the one who is dying to break out, and she was this fun, relaxed, smart, funny, caring girl. Finding out the truth about you only made you that much more incredible. You’re so strong. You’ve gone through so much, you’re going through so much, but you never stop trying. You’re amazing.” I was surprised when I felt Ryan’s hand lift my chin up. I didn’t want to look at him, I knew what would happen to my heart if I did, but I couldn’t stop myself. I craved him too much. When we made eye contact, his face lit up and he whispered, “I love you, Jamie Baker.” It came out of nowhere, and it stole the breath from me, leaving me speechless. Ryan stared at me, just waiting for some kind of reaction, and then I was the one who broke the no-kissing rule. It wasn’t my fault. He totally cheated! Like anyone could resist Ryan Miller when he’s touching your face and saying he loves you? I threw myself at him so fast that I startled him for a change, and he was the one who had to pull me off him when his hair started to stick up. “Sorry,” I breathed as he pulled away. “Don’t be sorry,” he teased. “Just stop.” “Sorry,” I said again when I noticed that his leg was now bouncing under the table. “Yeah. Looks like I don’t get to sleep through economics today.” “On the bright side, Coach could make you run laps all practice long and you’d be fine.

Victor’s foot kicked against something which bounced away into the darkness. “What was it?” he quavered. Gaspode snuffled off into the darkness, and returned. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Oh?” “It’s just a skull.” “Whose?” “He dint say,” said Gaspode.

I'm so good" I taunt him as i ease back bouncing on my calves like he does, and playfully sticking out my tongue. He totally misses that for hes watching my breast bounce. "real good" he says getting back into position. His eyes have darkened in a way that makes my insides roil with heat, and i decide this moment hes distracted with my girls is better then any.

I am not, I regret to say, a discreet and fetching sleeper. Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. My legs fall open in a grotesque come-hither manner; my knuckles brush the floor. Whatever is inside—tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air—decides to leak out. From time to time, like one of those nodding-duck toys, my head tips forward to empty a quart or so of viscous drool onto my lap, then falls back to begin loading again with a noise like a toilet cistern filling. And I snore, hugely and helplessly, like a cartoon character, with rubbery flapping lips and prolonged steam-valve exhalations. For long periods I grow unnaturally still, in a way that inclines onlookers to exchange glances and lean forward in concern, then dramatically I stiffen and, after a tantalizing pause, begin to bounce and jostle in a series of whole-body spasms of the sort that bring to mind an electric chair when the switch is thrown. Then I shriek once or twice in a piercing and effeminate manner and wake up to find that all motion within five hundred feet has stopped and all children under eight are clutching their mothers’ hems. It is a terrible burden to bear.

David cuts through all the many needs, wants, and desires that may have been bouncing around inside him and essentially says, "If I could have only one thing, I want to be with God, to be in His presence, to know that he is always with me." Whether in good times or bad times, David knew the thing he needed most: to feel God's presence close by, intimately, through worship.

Head tilted, Lou looked at her curiously. “Are you… are you trying to appeal to my conscience?” He snorted. “That inner voice gave up on me a long time ago. Honestly, trying to make me feel bad is more pointless than the ‘ay’ in ‘okay’. If self-centeredness could bounce, I’d be in orbit. And wouldn’t that be fun?” Harper sighed. “At least you’re honest about it.” “My shrink says I shouldn’t hold things in or pretend to be what I’m not. He says I should just be myself.” “Yeah, that was bad advice.” “And yet, I have a fan club,” Lou said smugly. “Several.” “You mean you have Satanic cults that worship you.” “Yeah,” he muttered, seemingly unimpressed by them.

Come, fly with me!" cried the goddess, as she sped ahead of them, her extremities flaming with a comet tail of sparks in the supernatural wind. Her bubbling voice again echoed, her laughter bounced in the crystalline void, and she flew onward, unto eternity.... "Stop!" cried Elasirr. "Come back with us to the true world, O Tilirreh!" At which the orange one laughed, throwing her head back, saying, "Oh, but don’t you know this is the one true world? It is but yours that is a pale specter, that is the dying place of dwindling truth?" "Then come back with us, lady," whispered Ranhé, "and restore the truth as it once was.

Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy - very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness. To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are naughty - much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as you please. They think you know and they will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly and scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be; nor yet will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run away if they fight you with persistency and judgment. You keep the dice and throw them both for your children and yourself. Load them then, for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them how singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all, but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children rather than anyone else's... You hold all the trump cards, or if you do not you can filch them; if you play them with anything like judgment you will find yourselves heads of happy, united, God-fearing families... True, your children will probably find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much service to them or inconvenience to yourself.

Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Lottie, trust me when I say you’re not imposing. I want you in my house, in my room, in my bed. I want you on my couch, holding my hand while watching a show you’ve forced me to reluctantly binge. I want you in my pool, skinny-dipping like you enjoy so much. I want you on my roof, feeling the rain bounce off you during a storm. I want you at my dining room table, eating dinner next to me, giving me a hard time for whatever reason you come up with that day.” He lifts my knuckles to his lips and places a soft kiss to them. “I want you, okay?

Tequila, anyone?” he asked our group, but his eyes were on me. “Hell, yeah, K, break it out,” Blake said. I tried to take a step back, but I couldn't go far. Kaidan poured the drinks, handing one to each twin and Blake. “Jay?” he asked. “Nah, dude. I gotta drive.” “Kope? Anna?” We both stared at him, not answering. “Oh, that's right, I nearly forgot,” Kaidan said with smooth indifference. “The prince and princess would never stoop so low. Well, bottoms up to us peasants.” What was up with that? The group shared a round of uneasy glances. Jay's mouth was set in firm disapproval as he stared at Kaidan, who wouldn't meet Jay's eye. The four of them raised their glasses, taking the shots and chasing them with bites of lime. I got a strong whiff of the pungent, salty tequila and gripped the counter with one hand. “How's your soda, princess?” Though Kaidan spoke with a calm air, there was underlying menace that pained me to hear. “You don't need to be so hateful,” I whispered. “If you ask me, I'd say the princess prefers a dark knight.” Ginger smirked and took a long drink of her beer. “She only thinks she does,” Kaidan said to her. I opened and closed my hands at my sides. After all we'd been through, how could he stand there and have the audacity to throw temptations in my face and insult me? I wanted to say something to shut him up, but the more flustered I got, the more tongue-tied I became. “Anna?” Jay asked. “You ready to bounce?” There was no way Jay was ready to leave. “No! Don't go yet,” Marna begged. She yanked the front of Kaidan's shirt. “You're scaring everyone off, Kai! If you can't be nice, then don't get so pissed.” “She means drunk,” Blake said to me in a stage whisper; then he added, “Brits,” with a roll of his eyes. Blake's attempt at comic relief didn't lighten the mood much. “My apologies,” Kaidan said to Marna. He slid the bottle away with the back of his hand, and Marna patted down the bit of shirt she'd crumpled. I stared at Kaidan, but he wouldn't meet my eye.

After we say our pleasantries, we disconnect and I close the screen. I boil in silence, until Henry speaks. “So…what’s new?” And I smack him. Open-palmed and so hard the sound bounces off the walls. He reaches for the spot I’d struck. “Fuck! What the hell you’d do that for?” He jabs me with his elbow. I punch him in the ear. And the next thing I know we’re rolling on the floor, cursing and pummeling each other. “Spoiled little fucker!” “Miserable bastard!” At some point during the scuffle, Logan pops his head in. “Never mind.” Then he backs out and closes the door.

Tenways showed his rotten teeth. ‘Fucking make me.’ ‘I’ll give it a try.’ A man came strolling out of the dark, just his sharp jaw showing in the shadows of his hood, boots crunching heedless through the corner of the fire and sending a flurry of sparks up around his legs. Very tall, very lean and he looked like he was carved out of wood. He was chewing meat from a chicken bone in one greasy hand and in the other, held loose under the crosspiece, he had the biggest sword Beck had ever seen, shoulder-high maybe from point to pommel, its sheath scuffed as a beggar’s boot but the wire on its hilt glinting with the colours of the fire-pit. He sucked the last shred of meat off his bone with a noisy slurp, and he poked at all the drawn steel with the pommel of his sword, long grip clattering against all those blades. ‘Tell me you lot weren’t working up to a fight without me. You know how much I love killing folk. I shouldn’t, but a man has to stick to what he’s good at. So how’s this for a recipe…’ He worked the bone around between finger and thumb, then flicked it at Tenways so it bounced off his chain mail coat. ‘You go back to fucking sheep and I’ll fill the graves.’ Tenways licked his bloody top lip. ‘My fight ain’t with you, Whirrun.’ And it all came together. Beck had heard songs enough about Whirrun of Bligh, and even hummed a few himself as he fought his way through the logpile. Cracknut Whirrun. How he’d been given the Father of Swords. How he’d killed his five brothers. How he’d hunted the Shimbul Wolf in the endless winter of the utmost North, held a pass against the countless Shanka with only two boys and a woman for company, bested the sorcerer Daroum-ap-Yaught in a battle of wits and bound him to a rock for the eagles. How he’d done all the tasks worthy of a hero in the valleys, and so come south to seek his destiny on the battlefield. Songs to make the blood run hot, and cold too. Might be his was the hardest name in the whole North these days, and standing right there in front of Beck, close enough to lay a hand on. Though that probably weren’t a good idea. ‘Your fight ain’t with me?’ Whirrun glanced about like he was looking for who it might be with. ‘You sure? Fights are twisty little bastards, you draw steel it’s always hard to say where they’ll lead you. You drew on Calder, but when you drew on Calder you drew on Curnden Craw, and when you drew on Craw you drew on me, and Jolly Yon Cumber, and Wonderful there, and Flood – though he’s gone for a wee, I think, and also this lad here whose name I’ve forgotten.’ Sticking his thumb over his shoulder at Beck. ‘You should’ve seen it coming. No excuse for it, a proper War Chief fumbling about in the dark like you’ve nothing in your head but shit. So my fight ain’t with you either, Brodd Tenways, but I’ll still kill you if it’s called for, and add your name to my songs, and I’ll still laugh afterwards. So?’ ‘So what?’ ‘So shall I draw?

I knew what she’d tell me. She’d say, “Something’s off about my life. I feel restless and frustrated. I have this hunch that everything was supposed to be more beautiful than this. I imagine fenceless, wide-open savannas. I want to run and hunt and kill. I want to sleep under an ink-black, silent sky filled with stars. It’s all so real I can taste it.” Then she’d look back at the cage, the only home she’s ever known. She’d look at the smiling zookeepers, the bored spectators, and her panting, bouncing, begging best friend, the Lab. She’d sigh and say, “I should be grateful. I have a good enough life here. It’s crazy to long for what doesn’t even exist.” I’d say: Tabitha. You are not crazy. You are a goddamn cheetah.

All the neighborhood dogs can see right through me. They know. They aren’t even barking. Out of pity, I suppose. The Carlucci’s dog is the worst barker in the neighborhood, but not today. I walk up to his gate and give it a shake. No reaction. He sits on the porch staring at me, like I ain’t nothin’. I look around and find a stick. I throw it at him. Down deep, I really didn’t intend to hit him, but the stick bounces off his rump. I cringe and cover my mouth. “Sorry,” I say. The old dog just walks to his back yard, disgusted with the whole mess. “You don’t understand,” I yell after him. “I’m having a life crisis!

It would be nice to say that after this small breakthrough, neither Liesel nor Max dreamed their bad visions again. It would be nice but untrue. The nightmares arrived like they always did, much like the best player in the opposition when you’ve heard rumors that he might be injured or sick—but there he is, warming up with the rest of them, ready to take the field. Or like a timetabled train, arriving at a nightly platform, pulling the memories behind it on a rope. A lot of dragging. A lot of awkward bounces.

I want you to stop taking cracker dust." "And he says it isn't a righteous streak," Andrew mused, more to himself than to Neil. "If it was righteousness I'd ask you to give up drinking and smoking, too," Neil said. "I'm only asking for this one thing. It doesn't have any effect on you anyway and it's an unnecessary risk. You don't need a third addiction." "I don't need anything," Andrew reminded him, right on cue. "If you don't need it, it'll be easy to give it up," Neil said. "Right?" Andrew thought it over a minute, then flicked his cigarette at Neil. It singed the material where it bounced off his shirt. Neil ground it out under his shoe when it hit the asphalt. The cool look he flicked Andrew was wasted; Andrew's gaze had already drifted past him in search of something more interesting. "I'm going to take your temper tantrum as a yes," Neil said. "I'll bring the money by your room tonight.

was going to say anyway. And he got to talk first because he had won the coin toss—heads—a victory over Maura. But at the moment he was wishing he had called tails. As Greg began going over his opening statement for the ninth time, the chairperson of the School Committee said, “For the next item under New Business, we have a proposal about . . . a comic-book club at Ashworth School. Who’s speaking on this?” Greg bounced to his feet and managed to say, “I . . . I am.” The chairperson pointed. “Please come up to the table and talk into the microphone.” Maura thought Greg looked very nice tonight in his blazer and his gray slacks. His black eye was almost gone, and she was pretty sure he had even tried to brush his hair. As Greg went down the center aisle, he got a good look at Mrs. Davenport sitting in the second row with the other principals. She wasn’t smiling.

To drop seeds into my belly. To spit a virus in my throat that grew into a giant “you” plant. The branches crawling up the walls of my insides and begging to claw my mouth open and make me say things I don’t mean. The dying leaves flaking off and swaying to the pit of my stomach in an imaginary breeze landing with a deafening thump. Echoes that bounce up between my teeth. And remind my tongue there is no more watermelon. Just empty space.

F--- off. It's not like that. Her and me. I'm just saying--" "That you hadn't left her for good. I never said you had. You just wanted to withdraw long enough to get used to the idea that you'd lost your chance. Lick your wounds, suck it in, and bounce back to being her friend and mentor, and be happy with just that." "I am happy with just that. It's all I want." "Is it? Or is that what you're telling yourself because you think you never had a shot in the first place? You'd better wake up fast, Jack, or she's going to settle for Quinn, and let me tell you, it's settling, because it's not Quinn she--

People think trauma is mental,” I say abruptly. “I’m mentally scarred, damaged, take your pick. And with enough therapy, time, my mind will heal and, ta-da, one day I’ll be all better again. But trauma isn’t just mental. It’s physiological. It’s an adrenal system that’s totally burnt out, so that I spend days at a time in fight mode.” I realize as I’m describing this that one of my knees is bouncing uncontrollably. “Followed by crashes where I can barely get out of bed.

I want you, Arianna Johnson, like no man has ever wanted a woman before. I’m sure of it. I want to give you the life you dreamed of, the one you shared with me. I want to give you a home on the ocean, one that will be ours, where the back deck faces the ocean, so we can sit outside at night while the sun sets, but only so we can watch the way the moon bounces off the water the way you love. I want to come home and cook for you while you sit back and watch our little one in your arms.

If he scratches my baby . . .” Ben tried to scowl, but it didn’t take. He seemed relieved. And still hadn’t let go of my hand. I heard a shoe scuff the ground. Shelton and Hi were standing across from Ben and me. Shelton took a deep breath. “So it’s like that, huh?” “Guys.” I felt my stomach lurch. “I know this is weird. Ben and I, we—” Hi’s face was pained. “I don’t even get a chance? No shot to say how I feel?” My head jerked back. “What?” “So it’s all decided.” Shelton sullenly kicked a rock, his voice resentful. “What does Ben have that I don’t?” I stared, openmouthed. Hi dropped to a knee and pinned me with solemn eyes. “I can’t hide it anymore, Victoria. You need to know the truth. I love you, too. Forever and ever. I want to be your sweet babushka.” My mind reeled. “Hi, I . . . I didn’t—” “I’m gonna wring your stupid necks.” Ben’s face was burning. Hi burst out laughing, rolling away from his kick. I glanced at Shelton, who was trying—and failing—to hold it together. “I love you, Tory Brennan!” Hi bounced to his feet, ready to bolt at Ben’s slightest twitch. “Let me rub your supple feet!” I covered my face with both hands. “Oh God.

But something about the static truth of numbers hurt my brain. Numbers felt sharp. Words felt elastic and springy. Language had an unpredictable, quicksilver quality, saying one thing but meaning something else, varying from place to place but maintaining (against all evidence) that it was the same language. Thinking about words was ticklish and amusing. It was also easy, as if they fit into slots and patterns prepared for them in my mind. Numbers on the other hand, bounced right out of my mind.

I stalked toward him, grinning. “Say something awesome, quick,” Frank said. “Preferably about me.” I dropped my pistols into my inventory, accessed the streamer menu and started recording. Then I slipped Frank out of his loop, activated Repel, and held him out in front of me. “This is what you’re after, right?” “What are you doing?” Frank said. “I’m introducing you,” I said. “Tyrann, meet Frank, aka the Axe of Unbridled Knowledge.” I cocked back and slapped Tyrann across the face with Frank as hard as I could. “Yes!” Frank said. The attack didn’t do any damage, but it launched Tyrann backward toward the boat and sent him skimming over the waves like a stone across a pond. “Yes yes yes!” Frank said at the top of his nonexistent lungs, and it felt like he was shadowboxing at my side. “You just got Franked, fool!” Tyrann bounced off a cresting wave and belly-flopped into the ocean.

I was scared—with that crystalline, childish fear of being caught and punished. That fear thrashed behind my rib cage like a bird in cupped hands, perhaps the last truly childlike instance of that emotion I’d ever feel. That fear is a kind of magic. As you get older, the texture of your fear changes. You’re no longer afraid of the things you had absolute faith in as a child: that you’d die in convulsions from inhaling the gas from a shattered lightbulb, that chewing apple pips brought on death by cyanide poisoning, or that a circus dwarf had actually bounced off a trampoline into the mouth of a hungry hippo. You stop believing in the things my uncle believed in. Even if your mind wants to go there, it has lost the nimbleness needed to make the leap. That magic gets kicked out of you, churched out, shamed out—or worse, you steal it from yourself. It gets embarrassed out of you by the kids who run the same stretch of streets and grown-ups who say it’s time to put away childish things. By degrees, you kill your own magic. Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you’d grow up to be.

There's a lot of talk these days about a thing called resilience. That's the in term at the moment," says Dr. John Leach, a survival psychologist. "You've got built-in resilience, so you can bounce back when you get knocked [down] by a survival situation. My argument with that is that if you've gone through a survival situation, you've gone through a POW camp, or you've been taken hostage, or you've been through sea survival, you will not be bouncing back to what you were before. You will not be bouncing back to who you were before. Because you won't be the same person. If you think you are meant to be the same person, you can have problems. You've had an experience that has changed you. Coupled with that is that the society, the world you're coming back to, has certainly changed in their perception of you. They don't know how to handle you. Normally, most survivors want above all to be treated as normal. But the rest of the world can't treat them as normal.

Bouncing hurt. Our ego is the part of us that cares about our status and what people think, about always being better than and always being right. I think of my ego as my inner hustler. It’s always telling me to compare, prove, please, perfect, outperform, and compete. Our inner hustlers have very little tolerance for discomfort or self-reflection. The ego doesn’t own stories or want to write new endings; it denies emotion and hates curiosity. Instead, the ego uses stories as armor and alibis. The ego has a shame-based fear of being ordinary (which is how I define narcissism). The ego says, “Feelings are for losers and weaklings.” Avoiding truth and vulnerability are critical parts of the hustle. Like all good hustlers, our egos employ crews of ruffians in case we don’t comply with their demands. Anger, blame, and avoidance are the ego’s bouncers. When we get too close to recognizing an experience as an emotional one, these three spring into action. It’s much easier to say, “I don’t give a damn,” than it is to say, “I’m hurt.” The ego likes blaming, finding fault, making excuses, inflicting payback, and lashing out, all of which are ultimate forms of self-protection. The ego is also a fan of avoidance—assuring the offender that we’re fine, pretending that it doesn’t matter, that we’re impervious. We adopt a pose of indifference or stoicism, or we deflect with humor and cynicism. Whatever. Who cares?

I believe God crafted the sound of a woman’s scream,” she says, “to pierce the heart and to test our humanity, whether we still have it or whether we have left it behind. “But there are men for whom a woman’s scream is as a fist that bounces off armor. I have thought to myself, What choices does a woman have for vengeance, for justice? For we cannot simply pray. I can’t stomach my mother’s prayers. We cannot afford to wait and be still. I won’t live this way—not anymore. So when I spoke to God that morning, I decided, if I am to scream, let it be in battle. There is no chance for peace except at the point of a sword.

Deep in infatuation I saw all things rosy Oh the thrill, the excitement, the new-found energy, and the bounce in my steps How so easy to make myself believe That I was in love! True love! From where came this jealousy? This anger? This bitterness? My loved one is hurting me I told myself repeatedly. Days passed. My negativity grew They need to pay for toying with me I swore Prayers for justice Curses to make them realise what they lost I saw all things black Found solace in quotes about Karma... From where came this calm? This blissful indifference? I don't know. I don't care. All I want to say is: thank you, Time.

the six of us are supposed to drive to the diner in Hastings for lunch. But the moment we enter the cavernous auditorium where the girls told us to meet them, my jaw drops and our plans change. “Holy shit—is that a red velvet chaise lounge?” The guys exchange a WTF look. “Um…sure?” Justin says. “Why—” I’m already sprinting toward the stage. The girls aren’t here yet, which means I have to act fast. “For fuck’s sake, get over here,” I call over my shoulder. Their footsteps echo behind me, and by the time they climb on the stage, I’ve already whipped my shirt off and am reaching for my belt buckle. I stop to fish my phone from my back pocket and toss it at Garrett, who catches it without missing a beat. “What is happening right now?” Justin bursts out. I drop trou, kick my jeans away, and dive onto the plush chair wearing nothing but my black boxer-briefs. “Quick. Take a picture.” Justin doesn’t stop shaking his head. Over and over again, and he’s blinking like an owl, as if he can’t fathom what he’s seeing. Garrett, on the other hand, knows better than to ask questions. Hell, he and Hannah spent two hours constructing origami hearts with me the other day. His lips twitch uncontrollably as he gets the phone in position. “Wait.” I pause in thought. “What do you think? Double guns, or double thumbs up?” “What is happening?” We both ignore Justin’s baffled exclamation. “Show me the thumbs up,” Garrett says. I give the camera a wolfish grin and stick up my thumbs. My best friend’s snort bounces off the auditorium walls. “Veto. Do the guns. Definitely the guns.” He takes two shots—one with flash, one without—and just like that, another romantic gesture is in the bag. As I hastily put my clothes back on, Justin rubs his temples with so much vigor it’s as if his brain has imploded. He gapes as I tug my jeans up to my hips. Gapes harder when I walk over to Garrett so I can study the pictures. I nod in approval. “Damn. I should go into modeling.” “You photograph really well,” Garrett agrees in a serious voice. “And dude, your package looks huge.” Fuck, it totally does. Justin drags both hands through his dark hair. “I swear on all that is holy—if one of you doesn’t tell me what the hell just went down here, I’m going to lose my shit.” I chuckle. “My girl wanted me to send her a boudoir shot of me on a red velvet chaise lounge, but you have no idea how hard it is to find a goddamn red velvet chaise lounge.” “You say this as if it’s an explanation. It is not.” Justin sighs like the weight of the world rests on his shoulders. “You hockey players are fucked up.” “Naah, we’re just not pussies like you and your football crowd,” Garrett says sweetly. “We own our sex appeal, dude.” “Sex appeal? That was the cheesiest thing I’ve ever—no, you know what? I’m not gonna engage,” Justin grumbles. “Let’s find the girls and grab some lunch

How fun it would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart’s bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r’s and g’s in a way I’d never learn. I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I’d never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can’t make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

Are the kids at school mean?” “Not mean, exactly. I’d say that the way they treat me is peculiar. More like I’m a zoo animal than a person.” A fist bounced against her leg. “I figured it out when I was visiting a primates exhibit once. People were staring at the gorilla, wondering what he would do next, hoping to be fascinated or creeped out. When he did something gross, they gasped and leaned closer. But when nothing more happened, they got bored and walked off.” The fist-thumping ended. “All the gorilla wanted was to be left alone. Instead, he was caged and made to entertain people against his will. I felt sorry for him until I reaized the cage protected him. Then I was jealous.

Getting tired already, minnow?” Toraf taunts as he wraps strong arms around Galen’s neck in a choke hold. Galen promptly flips him forward and onto his back. Toraf bounces once with the force. “You must have been drinking salt water,” Galen returns, “to have delusions like that.” Toraf kicks Galen’s legs out from under him, and the scuffle is taken to the floor. Just when I wonder how long this can really go on, the older Syrena steps into the dining room and confirms his identity with the authority in his voice. “That’s enough. Get up.” Toraf scrambles to his feet and steps away from Galen, who reluctantly complies. “Yes, Highness. Sorry, Highness,” Toraf says, breathless. There is not a small amount of shame on Toraf’s face. In fact, even Galen looks conscience stricken. “Apologies, King Antonis,” he says quickly. “I didn’t see you there.” King Antonis. Mom’s dad. My grandfather. Holy! Antonis lifts his chin, satisfied. “I didn’t think so.” Mom steps over the dish debris and embraces her dad. “Thank you for interrupting. It was getting a tad boring. It was obvious no one would win.” Mom is such a dude sometimes. Grom winks at Galen, who shrugs.

Alex was right in front of the mantel now, bent forward, his nose mere inches from a picture of me. "Oh,God. Don't look at that!" It was from the year-end recital of my one and only year of ballet class. I was six: twig legs, a huge gap where my two front teeth had recently been, and a bumblebee costume. Nonna had done her best, but there was only so much she could do with yellow and black spandex and a bee butt. Dad had found one of those headbands with springy antennai attached. I'd loved the antennae. The more enthusiastic my jetes, the more they bounced. Of course, I'd also jeted my flat-chested little self out of the top of my costume so many times that, during the actual recital itself,I'd barely moved at all, victim to the overwhelming modesty of the six-year-old. Now, looking at the little girl I'd been, I wished someone had told her not to worry so much, that within a year, that smooth, skinny, little bare shoulder would have turned into the bane of her existence. That she was absolutely perfect. "Nice stripes," Alex said casually, straightening up. That stung. It should't have-it was just a photo-but it did. I don't know what I'd expected him to say about the picture. It wasn't that. But then, I didn't expect the wide grin that spread across his face when he got a good look at mine, either. "Those," he announced, pointing to a photo of my mulleted dad leaning against the painted hood of his Mustang "are nice stripes. That-" he pointed to the me-bee- "Is seriously cute." "You're insane," I muttered, insanely pleased. "Yeah,well, tell me something I don't know." He took the bottle and plate from me. "I like knowing you have a little vanity in there somewhere." He stood, hands full, looking expectant and completely beautiful. The reality of the situation hadn't really been all that real before. Now, as I started up the stairs to my bedroom, Alex Bainbridge in tow, it hit me. I was leading a boy, this boy, into my very personal space. Then he started singing. "You're so vain, I bet you think this song is about you. You're sooo vain....!" He had a pretty good voice. It was a truly excellent AM radio song. And just like that, I was officially In Deep

Beside me, Sloane looked at Lia, then at Michael, then at Dean. Then she bounced closer to me. “There’s a forty percent chance this ends with someone getting punched in the face,” she whispered. “Come on, Dean-o,” Lia called. “Join us.” Those words were part invitation, part challenge. Michael’s body moved to Lia’s beat, and I realized suddenly that Lia wasn’t putting on a show for my benefit—or for Michael’s. She was getting up close and personal with Michael solely to get a rise out of Dean. Based on the mutinous expression on Dean’s face, it was working. “You know you want to,” Lia taunted, turning as she danced so her back was up against Michael. Dean and Lia had been the program’s first recruits. For years, it had been just the two of them. Lia had told me once that she and Dean were like siblings—and right now, Dean looked every inch the overprotective big brother. Michael likes pissing Dean off. That much went without saying. Lia lives to pull Dean off the sidelines. And Dean… A muscle in Dean’s jaw ticked as Michael trailed a hand down Lia’s arm. Sloane was right. We were one wrong move away from a fistfight. Knowing Michael, he’d probably consider it a bonding activity. “Come on, Dean,” I said, intervening before Lia could say something inflammatory. “You don’t have to dance. Just brood in beat to the music.” That surprised a laugh out of Dean. I grinned. Beside me, Michael eased back, putting space between his body and Lia’s.

I never knew it happened like that." I snap my gaze to her. "What?" "You know. Romeo and Juliet stuff. Love at first sight and all that." "It's not like that," I say quickly. "You could have fooled me." We're up again. Catherine takes her shot. It swishes cleanly through the hoop. When I shoot, the ball bounces hard off the backboard and flies wildly through the air, knocking the coach in the head. I slap a hand over my mouth. The coach barely catches herself from falling. Several students laugh. She glares at me and readjusts her cap. With a small wave of apology, I head back to the end of the line. Will's there, fighting laughter. "Nice," he says. "Glad I'm downcourt of you." I cross my arms and resist smiling, resist letting myself feel good around him. But he makes it hard. I want to smile. I want to like him, to be around him, to know him. "Happy to amuse you." His smile slips then, and he's looking at me with that strange intensity again. Only I understand. I know why. He must remember...must recognize me on some level even though he can't understand it. "You want to go out?" he asks suddenly. I blink. "As in a date?" "Yes. That's what a guy usually means when he asks that question." Whistles blow. The guys and girls head in opposite directions. "Half-court scrimmage," Will mutters, looking unhappy as he watches the coaches toss out jerseys. "We'll talk later in study hall. Okay?" I nod, my chest uncomfortably tight, breath hard to catch. Seventh period. A few hours to decide whether to date a hunter. The choice should be easy, obvious, but already my head aches. I doubt anything will ever be easy for me again.

Bloody rain” says Mr Chivers Bouncing a basketball On the one dry patch of court bloody rain” he nods to our Sports class And gives us the afternoon off. Bloody rain all right As Annabel and I run to Megalong Creek hut Faster than we ever have in Chivers’s class And the exercise we have in mind We’ve been training for all year But I doubt if old Chivers Will give us a medal if he ever finds out. We high jump into the hut And strip down Climb under the blankets And cheer the bloody rain As it does a lap or two Around the mountain While Annabel and me Embrace like winners should Like good sports do As Mr. Chivers sips his third coffee And twitches his bad knee From his playing days While miles away Annabel and I Score a convincing victory And for once in our school life The words “Physical Education” Make sense…

I unknot his tie and offer him a cold sandwich. He raps my backside, paying attention to the bounce. I walk around him as though he were a Maypole, kissing as I go. “I lost my cuff link, goddamnit” he says, and drops to the floor to look for it. I go down too on my knees, but I know he never had a cuff link in his life. Still I would do a lot for him. “Got you off you feet that time,” he says, laughing. “Oh yes, I did.” And before I can even make myself half comfortable on that polka-dotted linoleum, he got onto me right where we were, and the truth is, we were so happy, we forgot the precautions.

My bad mood returns like an unwanted rash. “I got in a fight with Logan. And that’s all I’m saying on the subject, because if I talk about it right now, it’ll just piss me off again and then I’ll be too distracted to produce Dumb and Dumber’s show.” We both glance at the main booth, where Evelyn is using the reflection on her water glass to check her makeup, dabbing delicately at her eye shadow. Pace is engrossed with his phone, his chair tipped back so far that I predict a very loud disaster in the near future. “God, I love them,” Daisy says with a snicker. “I don’t think I’ve ever met two more self-absorbed people.” Morris saunters out of the booth and wanders over to us. He notices Daisy’s shirt and says, “Sweetheart, we’re at work. Show some decorum.” “Says the guy who ripped this shirt off me in the supply closet.” Rolling her eyes, she takes a step away. “I’m going to make myself presentable in the bathroom. I’d do it out here, but I’m scared Dumber might take a picture and post it on a porn site.” “Wait, the names Dumb and Dumber actually correspond to each of them?” Morris says in surprise. “I thought it was more of a general thing. Which one is Dumber?” The second the question leaves his mouth, a muffled crash reverberates from the booth, and we all turn to see Pace tangled up on the floor. Yup, the guy who spent an hour regaling me about his cow-tipping days back in Iowa? Tipped himself right over. From behind the glass, Pace bounces to his feet, notices us staring, and mouths the words, “I’m okay!” Morris sighs. “I withdraw the question

Do you want to have some hot sex instead of getting into a cold cab and driving away?" She looked up and grinned. "I'm awake. You're awake. We've only gone three rounds. Why not make it an even four? I'm already undressed." She took his hand and drew it down between her legs. "You don't even have to waste time with foreplay. This is what you do to me. I'm all ready to go." "I shouldn't..." "Don't tell me you don't want to." She ground her hips against his cock, now rock hard beneath his boxers. "I simply won't believe you." Jay groaned. "I do, but..." "But what?" She dropped to her knees in front of him and drew his boxers down to his ankles. His cock, thick and hard, bounced gently in her direction. "You don't like soft wet lips, firm hands, and skills honed by years of beer funnels." She flicked her tongue over the swollen head of his shaft. "Say yes. Say you'll stay long enough for me to chase your demons away." His hand dropped to her head and he swallowed hard. "Yes, but I'll do the chasing.

The rain is colder than I expect—which is ridiculous, since it’s March. My cheeks are freezing by the time we go two blocks, my hair has a sodden weight on my shoulder. My glasses are so wet I need to shove them in a pocket. I threw Mom’s pullover windbreaker over my sweatshirt before leaving the house, thinking it would be waterproof, but I am so wrong. By the time I make the final turn for the church, I wonder if I’m stupid for being out here. It’s pouring so hard that a haze has formed around the streetlight, and I can barely see anything through the darkness. My sneakers squish in the grass. I get to the spot where we sat for the last two nights. And of course he’s not there. I sigh. Only a complete moron would go meet in the rain. Then Texy woofs and bounces on her front paws. I turn, and it’s like I’m in a chick flick. His shadowed figure lopes across the grass. Okay, maybe the dark and rain make it more like a horror movie than a romantic comedy, BUT STILL. He draws to a stop in front of me. He had the sense to wear a heavy, waterproof coat over his hoodie, but the hood is soaked and rain drips down his cheeks. “Hey,” he says, his voice a little loud over the rain. I’m blushing. I tell my cheeks to knock it off. “Hey.” “I wasn’t sure you’d show up, but I didn’t have a way to text you …” “I had the same thought process.

You really don’t believe that anything can have a value of its own beyond what function it serves for human beings?” Resaint said. “Value to who?” Resaint asked Halyard to imagine a planet in some remote galaxy—a lush, seething, glittering planet covered with stratospheric waterfalls, great land-sponges bouncing through the valleys, corals budding in perfect niveous hexagons, humming lichens glued to pink crystals, prismatic jellyfish breaching from the rivers, titanic lilies relying on tornadoes to spread their pollen—a planet full of complex, interconnected life but devoid of consciousness. “Are you telling me that, if an asteroid smashed into this planet and reduced every inch of its surface to dust, nothing would be lost? Because nobody in particular would miss it?” “But the universe is bloody huge—stuff like that must happen every minute. You can’t go on strike over it. Honestly it sounds to me to like your real enemy isn’t climate change or habitat loss, it’s entropy. You don’t like the idea that everything eventually crumbles. Well, it does. If you’re this worried about species extinction, wait until you hear about the heat death of the universe.” “I would be upset about the heat death of the universe too if human beings were accelerating the rate of it by a hundred times or more.” “And if a species’ position with respect to us doesn’t matter— you know, those amoebae they found that live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, if they’re just as important as Chiu Chiu or my parents’ dog, even though nobody ever gets anywhere near them—if distance in space doesn’t matter, why should distance in time? If we don’t care about whether their lives overlap with our lives, why even worry about whether they exist simultaneously with us? Your favorite wasp—Adelo-midgy-midgy—” “Adelognathus marginatum—” “It did exist. It always will have existed. Extinction can’t take that away. It went through its nasty little routine over and over again for millions and millions of years. The show was a big success. So why is it important that it’s still running at the same time you are? Isn’t that centering the whole thing on human beings, which is exactly what we’re not supposed to be doing? I mean, for that matter—reality is all just numbers anyway, right? I mean underneath? That’s what people say now. So why are you so down on the scans? Hacks aside. Why is it so crucial that these animals exist right now in an ostensibly meat-based format, just because we do? My point is you talk about extinction as if you’re taking this enlightened post-human View from Nowhere but if we really get down to it you’re definitely taking a View from Karin Resaint two arms two legs one head born Basel Switzerland year of our lord two-thousand-and-when-ever.” But Resaint wasn’t listening anymore.

I use my mom’s shampoo sometimes,” I blurt out. “I know I shouldn’t. I know it’s lady shampoo. But it smells better than mine, and I think my hair might like it better, and – but that doesn’t change the fact that that stuff, that’s for chicks. And, that, that’s probably gay, isn’t it? Like, at least a little.” “I don’t know whether—” “And I cried once listening to ‘The Scientist’ by Coldplay. I don’t know, I was in sort of a lousy mood anyway, but it’s not like that excuses that stuff. Like, that was gay, wasn’t it? Guys don’t just sit around and cry over Coldplay.” “Howie—” “And I loved Mamma Mia. Like, loved it. Amber made me watch it with her on TV once, and I didn’t want to, and she wound up thinking it was this sentimental piece of crap, but I loved it. It was all sunny and happy and there was all that blue sky and blue ocean, and everyone was just, like, so chill, all bouncing and singing and being so happy, and I just wanted to, I don’t know, live there or something. Jump right into the screen and sing backup to Dancing Queen. That’s gay, right? That’s queeriest queerdom. There’s no way that’s not totally gay. It’s gay. It’s so gay. I’m … I …” “If I may,” Arthur says. I take a deep breath. “Yeah, okay.” “I don’t like any of those things,” Arthur says, “and I am gay. So maybe you’re just girly.” That? That’s his answer? “I’m not girly,” I say, affronted. “Just an observation,” Arthur replies innocently. “You didn’t like Mamma Mia?” I ask, feeling like I just got kicked. “I’m not even really sure what it is,” Arthur replies, frowning thoughtfully. Useless bastard.

So,” Will begins, “do you play ball as well as you run?” I laugh a little. I can’t help it. He’s sweet and disarming and my nerves are racing. “Not even close.” The conversation goes no further as we move up in our lines. Catherine looks over her shoulder at me, her wide sea eyes assessing. Like she can’t quite figure me out. My smile fades and I look away. She can never figure me out. I can never let her. Never let anyone here. She faces me with her arms crossed. “You make friends fast. Since freshman year, I’ve spoken to like . . .” She paused and looks upward as though mentally counting. “Three, no—four people. And you’re number four.” I shrug. “He’s just a guy.” Catherine squares up at the free-throw line, dribbles a few times, and shoots. The ball swished cleanly through the net. She catches it and tosses it back to me. I try copying her moves, but my ball flies low, glides beneath the backboard. I head to the end of the line again. Will’s already waiting it half-court, letting others go before him. My face warms at his obvious stall. “You weren’t kidding,” he teases over the thunder of basketballs. “Did you make it?” I ask, wishing I had looked while he shot. “Yeah.” “Of course,” I mock. He lets another kid go before him. I do the same. Catherine is several ahead of me now. His gaze scans me, sweeping over my face and hair with deep intensity, like he’s memorizing my features. “Yeah, well. I can’t run like you.” I move up in line, but when I sneak a look behind me, he’s looking back, too. “Wow,” Catherine murmurs in her smoky low voice as she falls into line beside me. “I never knew it happened like that.” I snap my gaze to her. “What?” “You know. Romeo and Juliet stuff. Love at first sight and all that.” “It’s not like that,” I say quickly. “You could have fooled me.” We’re up again. Catherine takes her shot. It swishes cleanly through the hoop. When I shoot, the ball bounces hard off the backboard and flies wildly through the air, knocking the coach in the head. I slap a hand over my mouth. The coach barely catches herself from falling. Several students laugh. She glares at me and readjusts her cap. With a small wave of apology, I head back to the end of the line. Will’s there, fighting laughter. “Nice,” he says. “Glad I’m downcourt of you.” I cross my arms and resist smiling, resist letting myself feel good around him. But he makes it hard. I want to smile. I want to like him, to be around him, to know him. “Happy to amuse you.” His smile slips then, and he’s looking at me with that strange intensity again. Only I understand. I know why. He must remember . . . must recognize me on some level even though he can’t understand it. “You want to go out?” he asks suddenly. I blink. “As in a date?” “Yes. That’s what a guy usually means when he asks that question.

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got. And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever. And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives. And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

Depending on where it falls, the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely. If it lands in fertile soil it will be soaked up by plants or reevaporated directly within hours or days. If it finds its way down to the groundwater, however, it may not see sunlight again for many years—thousands if it gets really deep. When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade. In the ocean the residence time is thought to be more like a hundred years. Altogether about 60 percent of water molecules in a rainfall are returned to the atmosphere within a day or two. Once evaporated, they spend no more than a week or so—Drury says twelve days—in the sky before falling again as rain. Evaporation is a swift process, as you can easily gauge by the fate of a puddle on a summer’s day. Even something as large as the Mediterranean would dry out in a thousand years if it were not continually replenished. Such an event occurred a little under six million years ago and provoked what is known to science as the Messinian Salinity Crisis. What happened was that continental movement closed the Strait of Gibraltar. As the Mediterranean dried, its evaporated contents fell as freshwater rain into other seas, mildly diluting their saltiness—indeed, making them just dilute enough to freeze over larger areas than normal. The enlarged area of ice bounced back more of the Sun’s heat and pushed Earth into an ice age. So at least the theory goes. What is certainly true, as far as we can tell, is that a little change in the Earth’s dynamics can have repercussions beyond our imagining. Such an event, as we shall see a little further on, may even have created us.

When we’re in line for food, Peter reaches for a brownie and I say, “Don’t--I brought cookies,” and he gets excited. “Can I have one now?” he asks. I pull my Tupperware out of my bag and Peter grabs one. “Let’s not share with anybody else,” he says. “Too late,” I say, because our friends have spotted us. Darrell is singing, “Her cookies bring all the boys to the yard,” as we walk up to the table. I set the Tupperware down on the table and the boys wrestle for it, snatching cookies and gobbling them up like trolls. Pammy manages to snag one and says, “Y’all are beasts.” Darrell throws his head back and makes a beastlike sound, and she giggles. “These are amazing,” Gabe groans, licking chocolate off his fingers. Modestly I say, “They’re all right. Good, but not amazing. Not perfect.” I break a piece off of Peter’s cookie. “They taste better fresh out of the oven.” “Will you please come over to my house and bake me cookies so I know what they taste like fresh out of the oven?” Gabe bites into another one and closes his eyes in ecstasy. Peter snags one. “Stop eating all my girlfriend’s cookies!” Even a year later, it still gives me a little thrill to hear him say “my girlfriend” and know that I’m her. “You’re gonna get a gut if you don’t quit with that shit,” Darrell says. Peter takes a bite of cookie and lifts up his shirt and pats his stomach. “Six-pack, baby.” “You’re a lucky girl, Large,” Gabe says. Darrell shakes his head. “Nah, Kavinsky’s the lucky one.” Peter catches my eye and winks, and my heart beats quicker. I have a feeling that when I’m Stormy’s age, these everyday moments will be what I remember: Peter’s head bent, biting into a chocolate chip cookie; the sun coming through the cafeteria window, bouncing off his brown hair; him looking at me.

Sisyphus cheated death,” Nico explained. “First he chained up Thanatos, the reaper of souls, so no one could die. Then when Thanatos got free and was about to kill him, Sisyphus told his wife to do incorrect funeral rites so he wouldn’t rest in peace. Sisy here—May I call you Sisy?” “No!” “Sisy tricked Persephone into letting him go back to the world to haunt his wife. And he didn’t come back.” The old man cackled. “I stayed alive another thirty years before they finally tracked me down!” Thalia was halfway up the hill now. She gritted her teeth, pushing the boulder with her back. Her expression said Hurry up! “So that was your punishment,” I said to Sisyphus. “Rolling a boulder up a hill forever. Was it worth it?” “A temporary setback!” Sisyphus cried. “I’ll bust out of here soon, and when I do, they’ll all be sorry!” “How would you get out of the Underworld?” Nico asked. “It’s locked down, you know.” Sisyphus grinned wickedly. “That’s what the other one asked.” My stomach tightened. “Someone else asked your advice?” “An angry young man,” Sisyphus recalled. “Not very polite. Held a sword to my throat. Didn’t offer to roll my boulder at all.” “What did you tell him?” Nico said. “Who was he?” Sisyphus massaged his shoulders. He glanced up at Thalia, who was almost to the top of the hill. Her face was bright red and drenched in sweat. “Oh . . . it’s hard to say,” Sisyphus said. “Never seen him before. He carried a long package all wrapped up in black cloth. Skis, maybe? A shovel? Maybe if you wait here, I could go look for him. . . .” “What did you tell him?” I demanded. “Can’t remember.” Nico drew his sword. The Stygian iron was so cold it steamed in the hot dry air of Punishment. “Try harder.” The old man winced. “What kind of person carries a sword like that?” “A son of Hades,” Nico said. “Now answer me!” The color drained from Sisyphus’s face. “I told him to talk to Melinoe! She always has a way out!” Nico lowered his sword. I could tell the name Melinoe bothered him. “Are you crazy?” he said. “That’s suicide!” The old man shrugged. “I’ve cheated death before. I could do it again.” “What did this demigod look like?” “Um . . . he had a nose,” Sisyphus said. “A mouth. And one eye and—” “One eye?” I interrupted. “Did he have an eye patch?” “Oh . . . maybe,” Sisyphus said. “He had hair on his head. And—” He gasped and looked over my shoulder. “There he is!” We fell for it. As soon as we turned, Sisyphus took off down the hill. “I’m free! I’m free! I’m—ACK!” Ten feet from the hill, he hit the end of his invisible leash and fell on his back. Nico and I grabbed his arms and hauled him up the hill. “Curse you!” He let loose with bad words in Ancient Greek, Latin, English, French, and several other languages I didn’t recognize. “I’ll never help you! Go to Hades!” “Already there,” Nico muttered. “Incoming!” Thalia shouted. I looked up and might have used a few cuss words myself. The boulder was bouncing straight toward us. Nico jumped one way. I jumped the other. Sisyphus yelled, “NOOOOOOO!” as the thing plowed into him. Somehow he braced himself and stopped it before it could run him over. I guess he’d had a lot of practice. “Take it again!” he wailed. “Please. I can’t hold it.” “Not again,” Thalia gasped. “You’re on your own.” He treated us to a lot more colorful language. It was clear he wasn’t going to help us any further, so we left him to his punishment.

Come on, Princess," he called to the bench, and Carlotta bounced up. She was wide like the rest of them, but no man could fairly say she was too wide. The most that could be said was that she did not have much further to go before she would have to start squeezing it in and strapping it up, which she clearly did not do now. She let it hang where it was, and it did very nicely by itself. As she passed among the boys they looked her over with unconcealed envy, as though they knew she had something they didn't have but were not quite sure what it was. One thing was certain, she got more exercise than they did. The next to be noticed were her braids, they hung forward over her terrain, ignoring as much as possible her contours, like two shiny black meridianal lines demarking her longitudes as far down as the equator. It was not hard to imagine oneself spending a long lifetime on that bare little island alone, with no plan or ambition, too overcome with the heat to continue on south to the pole, far less return to the continents. Nothing productive could ever be accomplished there, but there would be comfort such as few men have known, there would be torpor. The body swelled with such thoughts, the mind shrank from them, and the longing eyes traveled finally up north, to where those meridians came together at a point above a bland white area vaguely charted, with few landmarks, no doubt sparsely inhabited. There the imagination halted.

Maybe the affecting aspect was that Madame Ko's tanukis sparked in an onlooker's muscles a kinetic memory of the innocent freedom of early childhood, when one could let one's body go all akimbo on the slightest whim, could bounce, flop, and skip about in pure corporeal joy without embarrassment, judgement, or restraint. Or maybe there was a more "mature" associations, memories, say, of being falling-down drunk at the company picnic-but now crazy little animals were serving as surrogates, allowing one to vicariously relive those deliciously liberating and rebellious moment while maintaining one's veneer of civilized respectability, protecting in the process, one's marriage, one's standing in the community, one's job. Or maybe, on a strictly subconscious level, circusgoers recognized in the antics of the tanukis-antics that appeared goofy and bumbling yet, at the same time, brave and successful-an analogy to their own blindly hopeful gyrations in a complex, impermanent universe where every happy dance was danced in the lengthening shadow of death. And maybe they were inspired, if only for a night, to emulate the tanuki capacity for self-enjoyment, a gift that ought to be the birthright of every Homo sapiens. or maybe not. Maybe all those interpretations are just so much god-fodder (The God-Fodder, The God-Fodder II), the very sort of bullshit responsible, some say, for keeping alive a modicum of divine interest in our discredited race.

It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards schism. He wrote for transition, an apocalyptic magazine (renovation out of decadence, a Joachite indication in the title), and has often shown a flair for apocalyptic variations, the funniest of which is the frustrated millennialism of the Lynch family in Watt, and the most telling, perhaps, the conclusion of Comment c'est. He is the perverse theologian of a world which has suffered a Fall, experienced an Incarnation which changes all relations of past, present, and future, but which will not be redeemed. Time is an endless transition from one condition of misery to another, 'a passion without form or stations,' to be ended by no parousia. It is a world crying out for forms and stations, and for apocalypse; all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx. It would be wrong to think that the negatives of Beckett are a denial of the paradigm in favour of reality in all its poverty. In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive. In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less continuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation; they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will bounce. Order, the Christian paradigm, he suggests, is no longer usable except as an irony; that is why the Rooneys collapse in laughter when they read on the Wayside Pulpit that the Lord will uphold all that fall. But of course it is this order, however ironized, this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makes Beckett's point, and provides his books with the structural and linguistic features which enable us to make sense of them. In his progress he has presumed upon our familiarity with his habits of language and structure to make the relation between the occulted forms and the narrative surface more and more tenuous; in Comment c'est he mimes a virtually schismatic breakdown of this relation, and of his language. This is perfectly possible to reach a point along this line where nothing whatever is communicated, but of course Beckett has not reached it by a long way; and whatever preserves intelligibility is what prevents schism. This is, I think, a point to be remembered whenever one considers extremely novel, avant-garde writing. Schism is meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty. It may, of course, be asked: unintelligible to whom? --the inference being that a minority public, perhaps very small--members of a circle in a square world--do understand the terms in which the new thing speaks. And certainly the minority public is a recognized feature of modern literature, and certainly conditions are such that there may be many small minorities instead of one large one; and certainly this is in itself schismatic. The history of European literature, from the time the imagination's Latin first made an accommodation with the lingua franca, is in part the history of the education of a public--cultivated but not necessarily learned, as Auerbach says, made up of what he calls la cour et la ville. That this public should break up into specialized schools, and their language grow scholastic, would only be surprising if one thought that the existence of excellent mechanical means of communication implied excellent communications, and we know it does not, McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' notwithstanding. But it is still true that novelty of itself implies the existence of what is not novel, a past. The smaller the circle, and the more ambitious its schemes of renovation, the less useful, on the whole, its past will be. And the shorter. I will return to these points in a moment.

When it passes us, the driver tips his cap our way, eying us as if he thinks we're up to no good-the kind of no good he might call the cops on. I wave to him and smile, wondering if I look as guilty as I feel. Better make this the quickest lesson in driving history. It's not like she needs to pass the state exam. If she can keep the car straight for ten seconds in a row, I've upheld my end of the deal. I turn off the ignition and look at her. "So, how are you and Toraf doing?" She cocks her head at me. "What does that have to do with driving?" Aside from delaying it? "Nothing," I say, shrugging. "Just wondering." She pulls down the visor and flips open the mirror. Using her index finger, she unsmudges the mascara Rachel put on her. "Not that it's your business, but we're fine. We were always fine." "He didn't seem to think so." She shoots me a look. "He can be oversensitive sometimes. I explained that to him." Oversensitive? No way. She's not getting off that easy. "He's a good kisser," I tell her, bracing myself. She turns in her seat, eyes narrowed to slits. "You might as well forget about that kiss, Emma. He's mine, and if you put your nasty Half-Breed lips on him again-" "Now who's being oversensitive?" I say, grinning. She does love him. "Switch places with me," she snarls. But I'm too happy for Toraf to return the animosity. Once she's in the driver's seat, her attitude changes. She bounces up and down like she's mattress shopping, getting so much air that she'd puncture the top if I hadn't put it down already. She reaches for the keys in the ignition. I grab her hand. "Nope. Buckle up first." It's almost cliché for her to roll her eyes now, but she does. When she's finished dramatizing the act of buckling her seat belt-complete with tugging on it to make sure it won't unclick-she turns to me in pouty expectation. I nod. She wrenches the key and the engine fires up. The distant look in her eyes makes me nervous. Or maybe it's the guilt swirling around in my stomach. Galen might not like this car, but it still feels like sacrilege to put the fate of a BMW in Rayna's novice hands. As she grips the gear stick so hard her knuckles turn white, I thank God this is an automatic. "D is for drive, right?" she says. "Yes. The right pedal is to go. The left pedal is to stop. You have to step on the left one to change into drive." "I know. I saw you do it." She mashes down on the brake, then throws us into drive. But we don't move. "Okay, now you'll want to step on the right pedal, which is the gas-" The tires start spinning-and so do we. Rayna stares at me wide-eyed and mouth ajar, which isn't a good thing since her hands are on the wheel. It occurs to me that she's screaming, but I can't hear her over my own screeching. The dust wall we've created whirls around us, blocking our view of the trees and the road and life as we knew it. "Take your foot off the right one!" I yell. We stop so hard my teeth feel rattled. "Are you trying to get us killed?" she howls, holding her hand to her cheek as if I've slapped her. Her eyes are wild and glassy; she just might cry. "Are you freaking kidding me? You're the one driving!

There is an inherent, humbling cruelty to learning how to run white water. In most other so-called "adrenaline" sports—skiing, surfing and rock climbing come to mind—one attains mastery, or the illusion of it, only after long apprenticeship, after enduring falls and tumbles, the fatigue of training previously unused muscles, the discipline of developing a new and initially awkward set of skills. Running white water is fundamentally different. With a little luck one is immediately able to travel long distances, often at great speeds, with only a rudimentary command of the sport's essential skills and about as much physical stamina as it takes to ride a bicycle downhill. At the beginning, at least, white-water adrenaline comes cheap. It's the river doing the work, of course, but like a teenager with a hot car, one forgets what the true power source is. Arrogance reigns. The river seems all smoke and mirrors, lots of bark (you hear it chortling away beneath you, crunching boulders), but not much bite. You think: Let's get on with it! Let's run this damn river! And then maybe the raft hits a drop in the river— say, a short, hidden waterfall. Or maybe a wave reaches up and flicks the boat on its side as easily as a horse swatting flies with its tail. Maybe you're thrown suddenly into the center of the raft, and the floor bounces back and punts you overboard. Maybe you just fall right off the side of the raft so fast you don't realize what's happening. It doesn't matter. The results are the same. The world goes dark. The river— the word hardly does justice to the churning mess enveloping you— the river tumbles you like so much laundry. It punches the air from your lungs. You're helpless. Swimming is a joke. You know for a fact that you are drowning. For the first time you understand the strength of the insouciant monster that has swallowed you. Maybe you travel a hundred feet before you surface (the current is moving that fast). And another hundred feet—just short of a truly fearsome plunge, one that will surely kill you— before you see the rescue lines. You're hauled to shore wearing a sheepish grin and a look in your eye that is equal parts confusion, respect, and raw fear. That is River Lesson Number One. Everyone suffers it. And every time you get the least bit cocky, every time you think you have finally figured out what the river is all about, you suffer it all over again.

This kind of parenting was typical in much of Asia—and among Asian immigrant parents living in the United States. Contrary to the stereotype, it did not necessarily make children miserable. In fact, children raised in this way in the United States tended not only to do better in school but to actually enjoy reading and school more than their Caucasian peers enrolled in the same schools. While American parents gave their kids placemats with numbers on them and called it a day, Asian parents taught their children to add before they could read. They did it systematically and directly, say, from six-thirty to seven each night, with a workbook—not organically, the way many American parents preferred their children to learn math. The coach parent did not necessarily have to earn a lot of money or be highly educated. Nor did a coach parent have to be Asian, needless to say. The research showed that European-American parents who acted more like coaches tended to raise smarter kids, too. Parents who read to their children weekly or daily when they were young raised children who scored twenty-five points higher on PISA by the time they were fifteen years old. That was almost a full year of learning. More affluent parents were more likely to read to their children almost everywhere, but even among families within the same socioeconomic group, parents who read to their children tended to raise kids who scored fourteen points higher on PISA. By contrast, parents who regularly played with alphabet toys with their young children saw no such benefit. And at least one high-impact form of parental involvement did not actually involve kids or schools at all: If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said. Only four in ten parents in the PISA survey regularly read at home for enjoyment. What if they knew that this one change—which they might even vaguely enjoy—would help their children become better readers themselves? What if schools, instead of pleading with parents to donate time, muffins, or money, loaned books and magazines to parents and urged them to read on their own and talk about what they’d read in order to help their kids? The evidence suggested that every parent could do things that helped create strong readers and thinkers, once they knew what those things were. Parents could go too far with the drills and practice in academics, just as they could in sports, and many, many Korean parents did go too far. The opposite was also true. A coddled, moon bounce of a childhood could lead to young adults who had never experienced failure or developed self-control or endurance—experiences that mattered as much or more than academic skills. The evidence suggested that many American parents treated their children as if they were delicate flowers. In one Columbia University study, 85 percent of American parents surveyed said that they thought they needed to praise their children’s intelligence in order to assure them they were smart. However, the actual research on praise suggested the opposite was true. Praise that was vague, insincere, or excessive tended to discourage kids from working hard and trying new things. It had a toxic effect, the opposite of what parents intended. To work, praise had to be specific, authentic, and rare. Yet the same culture of self-esteem boosting extended to many U.S. classrooms.

I select the right practice gun, the one about the size of a pistol, but bulkier, and offer it to Caleb. Tris’s fingers slide between mine. Everything comes easily this morning, every smile and every laugh, every word and every motion. If we succeed in what we attempt tonight, tomorrow Chicago will be safe, the Bureau will be forever changed, and Tris and I will be able to build a new life for ourselves somewhere. Maybe it will even be a place where I trade my guns and knives for more productive tools, screwdrivers and nails and shovels. This morning I feel like I could be so fortunate. I could. “It doesn’t shoot real bullets,” I say, “but it seems like they designed it so it would be as close as possible to one of the guns you’ll be using. It feels real, anyway.” Caleb holds the gun with just his fingertips, like he’s afraid it will shatter in his hands. I laugh. “First lesson: Don’t be afraid of it. Grab it. You’ve held one before, remember? You got us out of the Amity compound with that shot.” “That was just lucky,” Caleb says, turning the gun over and over to see it from every angle. His tongue pushes into his cheek like he’s solving a problem. “Not the result of skill.” “Lucky is better than unlucky,” I say. “We can work on skill now.” I glance at Tris. She grins at me, then leans in to whisper something to Christina. “Are you here to help or what, Stiff?” I say. I hear myself speaking in the voice I cultivated as an initiation instructor, but this time I use it in jest. “You could use some practice with that right arm, if I recall correctly. You too, Christina.” Tris makes a face at me, then she and Christina cross the room to get their own weapons. “Okay, now face the target and turn the safety off,” I say. There is a target across the room, more sophisticated, than the wooden-board target in the Dauntless training rooms. It has three rings in three different colors, green, yellow, and red, so it’s easier to tell where the bullets it. “Let me see how you would naturally shoot.” He lifts up the gun with one hand, squares off his feet and shoulders to the target like he’s about to lift something heavy, and fires. The gun jerks back and up, firing the bullet near the ceiling. I cover my mouth with my hand to disguise my smile. “There’s no need to giggle,” Caleb says irritably. “Book learning doesn’t teach you everything, does it?” Christina says. “You have to hold it with both hands. It doesn’t look as cool, but neither does attacking the ceiling.” “I wasn’t trying to look cool!” Christina stands, her legs slightly uneven, and lifts both arms. She stares the target for a moment, then fires. The training bullet hits the outer circle of the target and bounces off, rolling on the floor. It leaves a circle of light on the target, marking the impact site. I wish I’d had this technology during initiation training. “Oh, good,” I say. “You hit the air around your target’s body. How useful.” “I’m a little rusty,” Christina admits, grinning.

But the manner of giving voice to thoughts and feelings becomes particularly significant in the case of negative feelings or doubts about a relationship. The difference was highlighted for me when a fifty-year-old divorced man told me about his experiences in forming new relationships with women. On this matter, he was clear: "I do not value my fleeting thoughts, and I do not value the fleeting thoughts of others." He felt that the relationship he was currently in had been endangered, even permanently weakened, by the woman's practice of tossing out her passing thoughts, because, early in their courtship, many of her thoughts were fears about the relationship. Not surprisingly, since they did not yet know each other well, she worried about whether she could trust him, whether their relationship would destroy her independence, whether this relationship was really right for her. He felt she should have kept these fears and doubts to herself and waited to see how things turned out. As it happens, things turned out well. The woman decided that the relationship was right for her, she could trust him, and she did not have to give up her independence. But he felt, at the time that he told me of this, that he had still not recovered from the wear and tear of coping with her earlier doubts. As he put it, he was still dizzy from having been bounced around like a yo-yo tied to the string of her stream of consciousness. In contrast, the man admitted, he himself goes to the other extreme: he never expresses his fears or misgivings about their relationship at all. If he's unhappy but doesn't say anything about it, his unhappiness expresses itself in a kind of distancing coldness. This response is just what women fear most, and just the reason they prefer to express dissatisfactions and doubts - as an antidote to the isolation and distance that would result from keeping them to themselves. The different perspectives on expressing or concealing dissatisfactions and doubts may reflect a difference in men's and women's awareness of the power of their words to affect others. In repeatedly telling him what she feared about their relationship, she spoke as though she assumed he was invulnerable and could not be hurt by what she said; perhaps she was underestimating the power of her words to affect him. For his part, when he refrains from expressing negative thoughts or feelings, he seems to be overestimating the power of his words to hurt her, when, ironically, she is more likely to be hurt by his silence than his words. Such impasses will perhaps never be settled to the complete satisfaction of both parties, but understanding the differing views can help detoxify the situation, and both can make adjustments.

Mindy runs to the DVD player and delicately places the disk in the holder and presses play. “Will you sit in this chair, please, Princess Mindy?” I ask, bowing deeply at the waist. Mindy giggles as she replies, ”I guess so.” After Mindy sits down, I take a wide-tooth comb and start gently combing out her tangles. Mindy starts vibrating with excitement as she blurts, “Mr. Jeff, you’re gonna fix my hair fancy, ain’t you?” “We’ll see if a certain Princess can hold still long enough for me to finish,” I tease. Immediately, Mindy becomes as still as a stone statue. After a couple of minutes, I have to say, “Mindy, sweetheart, it’s okay to breathe. I just can’t have you bouncing, because I’m afraid it will cause me to pull your hair.” Mindy slumps down in her chair just slightly. “Okay Mr. Jeff, I was ascared you was gonna stop,” she whispers, her chin quivering. I adopt a very fake, very over-the-top French accent and say, “Oh no, Monsieur Jeff must complete Princess Mindy’s look to make the Kingdom happy. Mindy erupts with the first belly laugh I’ve heard all day as she responds, “Okay, I’ll try to be still, but it’s hard ‘cause I have the wiggles real bad.” I pat her on the shoulder and chuckle as I say, “Just try your best, sweetheart. That’s all anyone can ask.” Kiera comes screeching around the corner in a blur, plunks her purse on the table, and says breathlessly, “Geez-O-Pete, I can’t believe I’m late for the makeover. I love makeovers.” Kiera digs through her purse and produces two bottles of nail polish and nail kit. “It’s time for your mani/pedi ma’am. Would you prefer Pink Pearl or Frosted Creamsicle? Mindy raises her hand like a schoolchild and Kiera calls on her like a pupil, “I want Frosted Cream toes please,” Mindy answers. “Your wish is my command, my dear,” Kiera responds with a grin. For the next few minutes, Mindy gets the spa treatment of her life as I carefully French braid her hair into pigtails. As a special treat, I purchased some ribbons from the gift shop and I’m weaving them into her hair. I tuck a yellow rose behind her ear. I don my French accent as I declare, “Monsieur Jeffery pronounces Princess Mindy finished and fit to rule the kingdom.” Kiera hands Mindy a new tube of grape ChapStick from her purse, “Hold on, a true princess never reigns with chapped lips,” she says. Mindy giggles as she responds, “You’re silly, Miss Kiera. Nobody in my kingdom is going to care if my lips are shiny.” Kiera’s laugh sounds like wind chimes as she covers her face with her hands as she confesses, “Okay, you busted me. I just like to use it because it tastes yummy.” “Okay, I want some, please,” Mindy decides. Kiera is putting the last minute touches on her as Mindy is scrambling to stand on Kiera’s thighs so she can get a better look in the mirror. When I reach out to steady her, she grabs my hand in a death grip. I glance down at her. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is opening and closing like a fish. I shoot Kiera a worried glance, but she merely shrugs. “Holy Sh — !” Mindy stops short when she sees Kiera’s expression. “Mr. Jeff is an angel for reals because he turned me into one. Look at my hair Miss Kiera, there are magic ribbons in it! I’m perfect. I can be anything I want to be.” Spontaneously, we all join together in a group hug. I kiss the top of her head as I agree, “Yes, Mindy, you are amazing and the sky is the limit for you.